When interacting with a computer application, users may be confronted with a situation in which an application fails to appropriately respond. The application may appear to the user to be “hung” or non-responsive. Applications that appear to the user to be non-responsive may in some instances be legitimately non-responsive, but in other instances may simply fail to provide sufficient feedback to the user, when in fact the application remains operational.
In the Microsoft Windows operating system, produced by the Microsoft Corporation of Redmond Wash., applications that stop responding to messages sent by the operating system are classified as non-responsive. Other applications continue to respond to messages sent by the operating system but do not provide sufficient visual feedback to the users. As set forth above, both of these scenarios give users the impression that applications are hung.
Typically, operating systems have a mechanism for reacting to an application that is non-responsive. When the application fails to respond to messages sent by the operating system, the user can terminate the application through the operating system. A white space or ghosted screen typically appears in the window where the application was shown. Thus, visual treatments for non-responsive applications are not descriptive and do not provide sufficient visual feedback to the user.
Furthermore, no solution exists for tracking poorly behaved applications that, although they are responsive, provide insufficient visual feedback to users. A poorly behaved application may be sending messages to the operating system and receiving messages from the operating system, but fail to show a user prompt or dialog box in a manner that will appropriately alert the user that a response is required.
Accordingly, a solution is needed for determining whether an application is non-responsive or is merely awaiting user input. Furthermore a solution is needed for improving the visual treatment applied to application windows that are either non-responsive or that are operating normally but fail to provide a user with sufficient visual feedback to enable the user to continue working with the application. Furthermore, a solution is needed that enables a user to distinguish between a non-responsive and a poorly behaved application.